JOANNA C. MIGDAL - CENTOS OF EROTICA

From 2004 to 2009,  Joanna C. Migdal lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,  a vibrant artists and writers colony where she published a collaborative book of poetry and artworks entitled  My Quicksilver Lover.  In her hometown of New York City, she is active in the group Women You Should Know (WYSK). Her cento, Good Night, Noises Everywhere, a tribute to women poets of the past was featured on that site for the occasion of National Poetry Month, April 2015. She has performed in readings at the Poetry Project and at Artists Without Walls (AWOW) in the Chelsea area. 
 She still has a taste for spicyMexican food and strong margaritas which she indulges in while composing a chapbook,  
Wild Nights.

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Centos of Erotica       ​

Come to my bed of words.
I have written so many words wanting to live inside of you, to be of use to you.
 I can never describe the 10,000 beautiful, sensual ways we will make love.
 Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know.

Come with your rod that twists and is a serpent.

Look at me naked and I will replace sun and moon and every star in the sky.

I will offer you my breast. It’s soft. It won’t jab you or thrust you away.

Before today my body was useless.

Return often and take me in the night when the lips and skin remember.
 
 
 
 
*Sources in order of appearance: Virginia Hamilton Adair, Adrienne Rich, Huang O, Wislawa Symborska, Lucille Clifton, Charles Baudelaire, Ancient Egyptian lyric, Anne Sexton, C. P. Cavafy
 

How delicious is the winning of a kiss at love’s beginning.
She said: Oh, we shouldn’t do this. I replied: We should..
Kiss my lips. She did. Kiss my lips again. She did. Kiss my lips over and over again. She did.
Kiss me wherever however whenever.
And when I woke, her kiss still floated on my lips,
a thousand kisses deep.
 
 

Sources in order of appearance: Thomas Campbell. Kenneth Koch, Gertrude Stein, Delmore Schwartz, Emma Lazarus,  Leonard Cohen
 
 
 

I found you there in the sea in your woman nakedness and I made this praise to your                                                        nakedness in the sea:                                                                            
            Rainy season, seaweed entangled close as lovers
            I want to be the coral beads you touch to your lips
            I’m going to make a seawall with my small happiness
            I’d let you wade in me….a sweet glistening of my core                   
            Tides swelling within me as I’m embraced
            Soaked, soaked in carnal lust 
            The torrents go over us.                                                        
             his moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
 
  
Sources in order of appearance: John Ciardi. (two parts), Takako Hashimoto, Pierre de Ronsard, Julia de Burgos, gMay Swenson, Yoshiko Yoshino, , Shizuko Suzuki, CDWright, Muriel Rukeyser.